


The Crooked Man

by PlaidAdder



Series: Missing Pages [21]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Lestrade POV, Lestrade-centric, M/M, Story: The Adventure of the Empty House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 04:36:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14804477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: All day long I scribble notes on paper. Not just the case notes--the forms, too, permissions for this and requisitions for that. That you go home after a long day on the job and then you write more--I know there's money in it, but I could never make myself. Maybe that's changing now. Maybe one day the world will marvel at the Memoirs of Inspector Lestrade, as they do at Vidocq's.Well, this entry's going to be memorable, anyway.*****Lestrade comes to terms with Sherlock Holmes.





	The Crooked Man

August 5, 1891

I've never kept a diary. Or journal, or case-book, anything of that sort. Of course you make notes during the case. If I stacked all the notebooks I've filled on the job one on top of the other it would make a pile taller than I am. Maybe that's why I never kept one. All day long I scribble notes on paper. Not just the case notes--the forms, too, permissions for this and requisitions for that. That you go home after a long day on the job and then you write  _more--_ I know there's money in it, but I could never make myself. Perhaps that's changing now. Perhaps one day the world will marvel at the _Memoirs of Inspector Lestrade_ , as they do at Vidocq's.

Well, this entry will be memorable, anyway.

I was all but dead on my feet by teatime today. Adair's murder discovered last night, and everyone expects to have it solved by this morning. Even Holmes didn't work that fast, at least not most of the time, and he didn't have the papers howling at him and snapping at his heels or a toffy-nosed family behaving as if you're their personal valet and you're not giving satisfaction. It takes two constables on duty round the clock now to keep the onlookers and curiosity-seekers out of the crime scene, and still they try it. So I wasn't best pleased when I was up in Adair's bedroom,  _again,_ looking for clues,  _again,_ and blasting the Providence that had hustled Mr. Sherlock Holmes out of the world too soon to be any use with  _this_ headache, and Constable Wallace poked his beefy face round the door and said there was a gent outside insisting he had important information regarding the murder.

\--Take his statement and his address and send him on his way, I said. I'm surprised you haven't already, I added. This isn't the first time, nor the tenth nor the twentieth.

\--I've tried, sir. He will only speak with you personally. He's very persistent, sir. 

\--You'll find me even more persistent, my man, if you bring me any more nonsense today. Go down and clear him off and that's an order.

\--He told me I was to tell you he's an expert on air-guns, sir.

Air-guns. That was not a detail that had been in the papers, for there was still some dispute among my colleagues about that bullet and its provenance. I said I would come down.

\--If you please, sir, said Constable Wallace.

Just beyond the perimeter we had established, at the front of a crowd of onlookers, was a tall, foreign-looking gentleman with a neatly-trimmed beard, a rather loud mustache, and a pair of dark spectacles. He touched his glossy top hat, bowed at me, and introduced himself as Von Herder, a German mechanic, and made a few observations about trajectory and angle of entry and so on that showed me right away that either he really was an expert, or he had done the murder himself. I asked him to accompany me to the station and give his statement. He said he'd rather speak to me in private. Well, I didn't just come up from the country; I was hardly about to let him get me alone in a cab or in some establishment operated by his confederates. I took him into Adair's sitting room, shut the constables on the other side of the door, invited him to take a seat on the sofa, and placed myself opposite him, with my revolver handy.

\--Now then, I said, taking out a notebook with and flipping it open. Your surname is Von Herder?

\--Ja, said my informant.

\--And your Christian name is?

\--Siegfried, mein Herr.

\--And you say you have some special knowledge of how the Right Honourable Ronald Adair was killed.

\--Ja. Ich mache--excuse--I make, as you say--I make the air-gun that did this murder. I am sure of it.

\--What makes you so sure? I said.

He was about to answer when he was seized by a fit of coughing. He motioned to me that he was all right, but asked if he could please have ein bischen Wasser, bitte. There was a carafe behind me on the sideboard. I turned round to pour him some. 

"There, sir," I said, holding out the glass, "take that, you'll feel better."

He stood up and took the glass. He drained it, cleared his throat, and then said, "You're right. I feel quite a new man already. Thank you, Lestrade."

He took off the dark glasses and tucked them into his pocket. Then he peeled off the mustache and goatee. And I stood there feeling like the biggest fool in England. I was _mad_. Absolutely  _boiling_ mad. I was also so relieved I felt like weeping. Boiling and weeping. Boiling, weeping, and feeling a fool. I suppose that's how I've always known that I was in the presence of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

"Good God above," was all I could say.

"I'm beginning to think perhaps He might be," Holmes replied.

Thinking back on it I feel I should have been more astonished. I don't know. Some part of me had hoped that his death was just another of those dramatic demonstrations he took such childlike pleasure in. It seemed he never felt that the solution, in itself, was really enough. There always had to be something extra. He wanted so much to please. And not only that--to astonish and delight. He'd do me down in front of a colleague, snap at me to my face, pass remarks to Watson about the incompetence of the official police within my hearing--and then at the end, during the demonstration, he'd be like a little boy reading out his first composition to his father, desperately hoping to get that one word of approval that he'd live on for another week. I've always thought I was the only one who ever really saw that little boy. I felt a kind of fatherly tenderness for that boy. That made it easier to put up with the frequently insufferable man.

I said, "Does Doctor Watson know?"

He burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that the glass slipped out of his grasp, and he chased after it, finally catching it inches before it struck the parquet floor. He collapsed on the floor, holding the glass up triumphantly in one hand, still laughing. I was...not exactly  _not_ laughing. Sort of sitting on the ottoman looking at him and wheezing a bit.

"Yes," Holmes said, and he spread himself out on the floor on his back and looked up at me with a very solemn expression which kept buckling and rippling because he was still laughing inside. "Yes, Lestrade. Watson knows."

I could see I'd better put the glass somewhere safe. When I had, Holmes had rolled over on his stomach, and examining the parquet.

"What do you see?" I asked, quickly.

He looked up and said, "What? Oh. Oh, the murder. No, Lestrade, there's no clue here. Your murderer never even entered this house. He shot Adair from across the street, with an air-gun loaded with a soft-nosed bullet."

I returned to the ottoman. "How do you  _know_ that?" I said.

"Because that's how he tried to shoot me once in Vienna."

"Shoot _you_?" I demanded.

"Your killer is Colonel Moran, Lestrade. And if you come with me tonight, I'll help you catch him."

Holmes got to his feet and returned to the sofa. I shook my head. It was, as always, coming in too fast for me to reckon with it. "Colonel Moran is an honourable soldier. They played cards together. I can't imagine why--"

"Ah, you'd understand it if you could see everything I saw."

"I have eyes of my own, Mr. Holmes, even if they're not as keen as--"

He sat up, very suddenly, and put a hand on my arm. I stopped in my tracks. There was something arresting about him. I don't know. I'd never seen him look at me that way--as if he was sorry for me.

"I don't mean that you don't see what's in front of you," he said. "I mean that you didn't actually see everything I saw. I mean that a very important piece of evidence that would have shown you Moran's motive quite clearly had been removed from the scene before you ever came to it."

"Removed!" I exclaimed, boiling again. "By whom?"

He sighed.

"By myself, Lestrade."

"By _you_!" I shouted. I am ashamed to admit it, but I felt near tears.

"I'm sorry, my dear fellow. I hated to do it, Lestrade," he said. "But I had to. For Mycroft."

"Why on _earth_?" I exclaimed. 

"You see, Adair was recruited--I use the word loosely--by one of those secret Committees, as a spy. Moran has been selling stolen state documents, and Adair was to catch him in the act. You weren't to be told, of course, until the denouement, when you would arrest him in the act."

"Of course," I muttered, snapping my notebook shut and thrusting it angrily into my pocket. "I always come in at the end, don't I? When you need a pair of handcuffs and a jail. That's what I'M good for."

"Oh, Lestrade," Holmes sighed. "It's not about you. It really isn't. Except that--well--you're an honest man, Lestrade. An upright man who upholds the law. You don't know how valuable that makes you. And you don't know what we--I mean wretches like Mycroft and myself--what we do to keep you that way."

I stared at him, fuming. I wanted to stay on the boil; but he was looking at me so sadly, so sort of wistfully, that it was hard.

"The motive for this murder, Lestrade, has to go into the vault. I'm sorry, but it must. Too many of the mighty are dirtied by it. Lord Holdhurst has resigned and will retire to his country estate in Yorkshire, and--"

"Lord Holdhurst?" I interrupted. "Why?"

Holmes avoided my question, and my gaze. I made an uncharacteristically swift deduction.

"Was he the one?" I asked.

"Lestrade..."

"WAS HE THE ONE?"

"I'm sorry, old fellow, but I simply can't answer--"

"Damn you, Holmes!" I shouted. "Resigned? He should be in jail. He's a traitor to this city. He's a murderer by proxy. Instead he retires to Yorkshire. That's a punishment?"

"If it's any consolation," Holmes said, "Mycroft has, I believe, entirely broken his heart."

"It would be more to the point to break his bones," I replied. "That man should be on the scaffold. Or if not on the scaffold, then on the treadmill. That's where criminals belong."

"That's not where ANYONE belongs!"

I was too angry to respond. And so was he, for a moment. But he mastered himself first.

"Lestrade, if you went after him, you wouldn't have secured a conviction in any case. The only actual evidence we have is a letter that doesn't even mention him by name. Mycroft managed to bluff him into resigning. I sincerely believe that is the best we could have done."

I know the courts, I know the press, and I know how savagely the big fish protect one of their own when he's taken. Holmes was right. I hated knowing that he was right. I often do.

Finally, more kindly, he resumed.

"If Adair's family learns that he was as good as blackmailed into this mission, over the strong objections of my brother, they will make a public scandal of it. My brother has the minutes of the meeting at which this was decided. He would divulge them if asked. He is quite--idiosyncratic--in some of his notions; and while he will happily conceal things that nobody knows about, he would refuse to withhold information from a public that vigorously demanded it. That, I fear, would be the end of this government; and the new government certainly would not continue to employ my brother. Mycroft, I'm afraid, is really fit for no other occupation. He complains ceaselessly about his position, but he loves it. I don't know that he could survive without his work. I'm sorry, Lestrade. You are--you are--you have always been--"

I became afraid of the tail end of that sentence. "Mr. Holmes--there's no need--"

"--let me finish--a good friend to me, Lestrade."

I was vexed to feel a lump in my throat.

"But he's my brother. You see, don't you, the position I'm in?"

"I see," I said, sternly, "that you have once again put your own interests above the law."

"Who does it harm?" he demanded, throwing an arm out. "The people? Well, this government isn't very good; but they don't get very much better. The law? Let's not talk about the law, Lestrade, I can't love it and I refuse to try. The one person I do feel some compunction about harming here is you. And that's why I came here today to tell you what happened. I didn't have to."

He was right; and he was, at the same time, wrong. And that is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, all over.

"There's a murderer on the loose," I replied, unmoved. 

"Only until tonight," he said. "If you'll come with us."

"Us," I repeated.

"Well, Watson will be in at the kill, of course."

There was something about the way he said Dr. Watson's name that made me take a closer look at him.

"Holmes," I said, slowly.

"Lestrade, stop there," he cut in, holding up a hand. "I beg you. If you ask me what you are about to ask me, we are all ruined."

Because I am an upright man who upholds the law, and loses good men doing it. Because the moment he says  _well done Lestrade, you can deduce something after all, _that's the moment I become a crooked man who bends the law. Holmes can be that; I can't. I can't be the man who says,  _well since it's you I'll make an exception._ Holmes is right; and he's also wrong. I know, and I don't know. 

He told me what he's planning. It's a lunatic plan--wax dummies and silhouettes and a silent vigil in a dark empty house. He's trying to outdo himself. But he's planned it as if it were my birthday party and I can't refuse to attend. So I'm going. I'm going out on a dark night to arrest a dangerous man for shooting at someone who's supposed to be dead, in order to convict him for a murder I can't prove he's done. It's right and it's wrong and it makes me damned uncomfortable. I don't like seeing any of it written down. I feel I should burn this when I'm done. But that would feel like destroying evidence.

He wanted to so much to give me Moriarty. He's giving me Moran instead. I wouldn't have the heart to turn him down. Poor Doctor Watson; I don't know what he makes of it all. I wonder how he's going to tell this story. I'll wager that when that manuscript goes off to his editor, there'll be quite a few pages missing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> It took me SO LONG to figure out how I was going to do "Empty House." I had actually written a whole thing with Mycroft's minutes of the Committee meeting in which he exposed Lord Holdhurst and I just thought, this isn't working. I thought about it, and I thought: what is this series really about? Documents, and character. So "The Purloined Letter" came out of the documents part of that, and "The Crooked Man" came out of the character part. The title comes from Doyle's story "The Crooked Man," which has very little to do with this one except that Holmes, like the broken-down old soldier in the canon "Crooked Man," has returned to England after a long period of captivity, wandering, and illness caused by the fact that another Englishman betrayed him. 
> 
> Lestrade has only appeared once in this series, very briefly, in "The Seven Napoleons," which is almost totally straight exposition. So I let him close out the plot. I had always been thinking, anyway, that Lestrade would have to be the one character who can't embrace the new relationship status. It is illegal, and it does technically make Holmes and Watson criminals, and he is the police. And yet, I figure that like most people who've been around Holmes and Watson for any length of time, Lestrade must on some level 'know' about Holmes and Watson. Ergo, this little foray into the double consciousness of Inspector Lestrade.
> 
> Much of his characterization here, again, even though this isn't a Granada-based series in most ways, comes from Colin Jeavons's performance, and especially in the Granada "Six Napoleons," which ends with one of those dramatic demonstrations. What Lestrade says about Holmes the little boy and Holmes the man is sort of based on my reading of Brett's reactions to that speech.
> 
> Adair's murder in "The Empty House" is so secondary to all the reunion drama that Holmes never actually determines what Moran's motive was. He generates a theory in the last couple paragraphs, but it's literally an afterthought. "The Right Honourable" and this story explain that anomaly: Holmes absolutely does know what the motive is, but that can't be made public.


End file.
